Ivan Reitman says more Ghostbusters movies are in development

After all of the vitriol directed towards Paul Feig's GHOSTBUSTERS on the road to its release, it seemed as though the film would either have to be a steaming pile of garbage or a comedic masterpiece, but the final product wound up generating little emotion from me one way or another. Other opinions may differ, but I didn't find GHOSTBUSTERS to be good or bad, it simply...was. Sony Pictures was obviously hoping that the movie would have been a bigger success, and GHOSTBUSTERS producer Ivan Reitman admitted to io9 that he was disappointed in the film.

We certainly would’ve loved to have a larger hit, but considering the last film was almost 30 years ago, it really did extremely well. I think the film cost too much, frankly, and that’s the real issue. I personally had other points of view in terms of where the film should go and it was kind of a continuous conversation with Paul [Feig] about that. But Paul was the filmmaker on this one and he’s a very talented director. I wanted to give him enough room to do the film he thought it should be.

Despite that disappointment, Reitman still believes that GHOSTBUSTERS is a "wonderful [intellectual property] because it has so many storytelling opportunities." There are several GHOSTBUSTERS projects on the way, including a comic and a VR video-game, but Reitman also confirmed that "multiple new movies" are being developed, the first of which will be the animated GHOSTBUSTERS film.

We jumped into an animated film [after the last movie] and we are developing live-action films. I want to bring all these stories together as a universe that makes sense within itself. Part of my job right now is to do that.

Ivan Reitman hopes that the animated GHOSTBUSTERS film will be released in theaters in 2019 or 2020, but he can't guarantee it. "It depends on on how fast we can get it all together," said Reitman. "It’s hard to make an animated film." I remain unconvinced that the GHOSTBUSTERS really needs to be a big movie franchise, but here we are.